The text of my Stonewall Award acceptance speech from June 2020

(I’m sorry for not posting this sooner. It’s been a weird time.)

Years ago I was sitting at a coffee shop after work, struggling away at the first draft of something. It was an idea I had for a middle grade novel, about ghosts and being queer and how well your family can know you before you can even know about yourself. But in addition to all the normal reasons why writing a book is hard, I was having a hard time believing that writing this, or any story, was worth it.

Y’see, the day before, an old friend had come over for tea, and we talked about what weighed us down; climate change, the world to come, the need to work toward the future while despairing of one.

So in between hacking away at paragraphs I texted him, something like “I don’t know how to work on this ghost story when the world is gonna end.” And he responded with the truth, that we will still need stories on the other side of what is coming.

Of course, I could also console myself with the reminder that writing stories about LGBTQ kids does manage to feel necessary even in a climate disaster. Like, in 2016 I had the honor of presenting the Stonewall awards in Orlando, Florida, specifically the Florida Ballroom, which was a disappointing business-casual Brutalist parody of the ballrooms my childhood taught me to expect from the land of Disney. We were celebrating books by Alex Gino, Bill Konigsberg, Cory Silverberg, and Christopher Barzak, and it was two weeks after the Pulse shooting. I remember feeling like the enormity of queer loss required a constant output of queer joy, queer love, queer lives, if we were ever going to tip the balance in our favor.

It’s hard to feel that way now. I’m still working on books, more stories about queer lives and queer joy. That first draft I was despairing over should come out next spring, from Dial Books, called TOO BRIGHT TO SEE. But it’s impossible to predict what future those stories will be birthed into. 

Of course, we never know what tomorrow or next year will bring--the Unetaneh Tokef prayer we Jews say on Yom Kippur, “Who shall perish by water and who by fire, Who by sword and who by wild beast, Who by famine and who by thirst, Who by earthquake and who by plague,” felt portentous in this fall, just because of, well, everything. But even a proud, unabashed pessimist like myself never quite expected all this to happen.

I’m an elementary school librarian, and in early March one of my fourth graders announced that the world was falling apart because of the coronavirus. I told him, comfortingly, that that wasn’t true. Then I added, more honestly, that if he was right, well, the world has fallen apart many times before, and then got put back together in different ways. That in fact the world was always falling apart, and always being put back together. And that we could help decide what comes next.

The last paragraph of the author’s note in WHEN AIDAN BECAME A BROTHER, the reason I’m accepting the Stonewall Award today, says that, “Life for Aidan, and for all different kinds of kids, will be full of growth and change. I don’t know what the future holds for him, but I hope he lives in a world that supports and believes in him. Thank you for helping to create that world.” Part of the thinking behind that was to encourage kids who identified with a young trans boy to also allow themselves the freedom to change. My gender and sexuality have evolved continuously over the course of my life, and I wanted to leave room for readers to understand the possibilities for what their future could look like, if they remain open to it. And, I have to be honest, a little part of my brain was like “the world is bad right now, and it could easily get worse. How do I hint at that but also not freak people out?” 

So I wanted to end with a challenge. To say that the world was how it was when I wrote those words, and it is whatever it is while you’re reading them. But it will also become something else, and it is all of our jobs to create the future in the image of what we hold in our hearts and bones and fists.

I’ve also been thinking a lot about Emily St. John Mandel’s novel, Station Eleven, where a new strain of the flu more than decimates the world population, and a group of players tour the almost empty country, performing Shakespeare for small communities of survivors. It’s a reminder that humans always crave stories, crave escape, and that art, individually and as a concept, can survive just about anything. We are all creating the future for stories to live in. And there will always be a future for stories, so please don’t stop believing in yours.